Discount bookseller takes on Crown name

EDMOND JACO- Staff Writer

ESCONDIDO —— Read a good book lately? Andy Weiss hopes that you
did, and that you would like to again. Weiss is president of
A&S Booksellers Inc., a company that buys book publishers'
production overruns and retails them at half the cover price.

Since 2001, Weiss' company has been doing that under the name
Crown Books. He rented a former furniture store at 415 Escondido
Blvd. in Escondido in April and opened a Crown Books Liquidation
Center, which has an inventory of 60,000 or so books from
dictionaries to novels, children's books to books on tape. There is
another in Vista at 1861 University Drive.

Crown Books was one of the original discount booksellers —— the
company's slogan was "If you paid full price, you didn't buy it at
Crown Books" —— and a spinoff from chains of drugs and auto parts
stores owned by the Haft family in Washington, D.C. Crown Books
actually went belly-up in 2001, and a bankruptcy court ordered the
sale of its assets. Weiss bought the name —— and the slogan. He
didn't buy any books.

"I read that the shelf life of a new bestseller used to be 10 to
12 weeks, but now because of Internet sales, it could be as little
as six or eight weeks," Weiss said.

When sales wane, many frontline stores pull all but a few copies
of a book off their shelves and return the remainder to the
publisher. In the trade, it's called remaindering, and those books
are sold by the pallet to companies such as A&S Booksellers,
which sell them to the public at discount prices.

"We have all new books here," Weiss said. "They range from 6
months old to maybe 3 or 4 years, but they're not used books."

Most of the books spread out on tables in the Escondido store's
25,000-square-foot sales floor are half price; others are marked
down even more. A lot of them are priced at $5.

"The Internet has hurt us," Weiss said. "Internet sellers like
Amazon.com offer a lot of books —— the same kind we sell —— for
just $3. But people don't realize that shipping adds $3.50 to that
price, so by the time the book arrives at the buyer's home, it
costs more to buy it from them."

Not to be outdone, however, Weiss' company also sells books on
the Internet.

"I have seven pages of Internet orders to do today," said Esther
Seddig of Escondido who works at the Escondido Crown Books
Liquidation Center. "And I had seven pages yesterday."

Weiss makes the business model work not only by buying the books
cheap in discount lots, but also by renting space cheap as a
short-term tenant in spaces that have been vacated in small and
medium sized shopping centers. He takes the property as-is, uses
plain tables with plywood tops instead of expensive shelving, and
is prepared to move out in a year or two. The result is low rent in
space that usually demands higher rent.

Shuffling through a stack of coffee table sports memorabilia
books, Weiss said that, at 99 cents apiece, they were a perfect
gift idea for a businessman who has a long Christmas list.

"We used to sell about 1 million to 1.2 million books a year in
2001 or 2002; now we're selling maybe half a million books a year,"
Weiss said.

"But in a few weeks, we'll have the new Harry Potter book,
number 6. And it will be at the same time other bookstores have it,
but our price will be $19.95."